Ernst Wolfgang Caspari

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Ernst Wolfgang Caspari (born October 24, 1909 in Berlin , † August 11, 1988 in Rochester ) was a German-American zoologist and geneticist.

Life

Ernst Caspari was born in Berlin in 1909 as the son of the oncologist Wilhelm Caspari (1872–1944) and Gertrud Caspari. He studied zoology and went to the University of Göttingen for his doctoral thesis in 1931 , where he received his doctorate in the summer of 1933 with Alfred Kühn with a developmental work on the flour moth . Caspari's work with Kühn, which he continued until 1935, was important steps on the way to the one-gene-one-enzyme hypothesis , several years before the work of George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum with Neurospora .

As a Jew, Caspari was unable to complete his habilitation in Germany and went into exile in Turkey in 1935 , where he worked as an assistant to the microbiologist Hugo Braun at the University of Istanbul . In 1938 he married in Istanbul and with the help of Leslie Clarence Dunn was able to receive a scholarship from Lafayette College (Easton, Pennsylvania), which enabled him to go to the United States. There he worked with Dunn in the field of mouse genetics and was appointed Assistant Professor in 1941 . In the same year his parents, who remained in Germany, were deported; the father died in 1944, the mother's whereabouts remained unclear.

In 1944 Curt Stern brought him to the University of Rochester , where both worked as part of the Manhattan Project on the influence of low-dose gamma rays on the mutation rate in Drosophila melanogaster . In 1944, Caspari took American citizenship. In 1946 he went to Wesleyan University as a professor of biology , where he also worked on behavioral genetics , among other things . Since 1959 he was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

In 1960 he returned to Rochester, where he was Chairman of the Department of Biology until 1966 . In 1966 he became president of the Genetics Society of America . In addition to his own research, Caspari was editor of the journals Genetics and Advances in Genetics . In 1975 he retired from Rochester . In 1979 he received the Theodosius Dobzhansky Memorial Award for eminent contributions to behavior genetics , in 1983 the Justus Liebig University of Giessen honored him with an honorary doctorate and the University of Göttingen with a gold doctorate.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ EM Eicher: Ernst W. Caspari: geneticist, teacher, and mentor. In: Adv Genet. 24, 1987, pp. Xv-xxxi. PMID 3324696
  2. E. Caspari: About the effect of a pleiotropic gene in the flour moth Ephestia kühniella Zeller. Dissertation . Göttingen 1933. In: Wilhelm Roux 'Archiv f. Development mech. d. Organisms. Volume 130, H. 3/4, pp. 353-381.
  3. ^ U. Grossbach: Genes and development: an early chapter in German developmental biology. In: Int J Dev Biol. 40 (1), Feb 1996, pp. 83-87. PMID 8735915
  4. ^ E. Caspari, C. Stern: The Influence of Chronic Irradiation with Gamma-Rays at Low Dosages on the Mutation Rate in Drosophila melanogaster. In: Genetics. 33 (1), Jan 1948, pp. 75-95. PMID 17247272

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